Crozekiel

My biggest hurdle is honestly that GrapheneOS only supports Pixel phones… I had one once and hated it and honestly don’t know how much of that was because of google’s android or the phone itself and am reluctant to buy a new pixel phone to try GrapheneOS and find out I still hate the hardware. I’ve had a much better “out of the box” experience with Samsung phones (and love that my current one has an sd card slot and headphone jack - but I know that’s pretty much non-existent on new phones) but am finding they are so locked down and closed off by Samsung you can’t really put anything else on it and have it work properly as far as I can tell.

It’s time for a new phone, and I’m honestly not sure what to do… The easy route seems like getting a pixel and putting GrapheneOS on it before doing anything else, but I just don’t super trust that the hardware isn’t going to drive me nuts…

In my experience with them, MSI laptops tend to run quite hot in general, your OS probably isn’t going to fix it. You can try one of those laptop cooling plates, basically a mesh platform with fans, ensuring cool air is always available to the laptop intakes, but it isn’t exactly a perfect solution.

Really it just needs more cooling capacity - they seem to cut razor close to the amount needed in their designs so when eventually cooling becomes less efficient either through fans getting tired/clogged or thermal paste/pads breaking down, it will not keep up.

You can’t plagiarize mechanics because you cannot copyright mechanics… And you don’t want to live in a world where you can. Imagine if the first company to make a first person shooter game copyrighted it… Or if Nintendo owned the rights to all 2d side scrolling games… Gaming would have never grown to what it is today.

Hell, even board games would have been crippled by this kind of copyright.

2 pikachus climbing a house cat.

I think the biggest problem with Linux is that a lot of self-proclaimed “savvy” computer users need to check their ego… It’s either people that have used Linux since 2008 and want to gate-keep the community because their superiority complex is a poorly built house of cards; or it’s people that have only ever used modern windows and think they are good with a computer that went and tried to install Linux and screwed it up because it didn’t work exactly like windows.

Average computer users aren’t comfortable installing windows and do not feel like they can fix it if something goes wrong…

This is really and truly terrible all around. Firstly, its a link to a website talking about a post on Lemmy… Why the hell is this just not a post? Why do we need an external website for this terrible excuse for “an article”? Secondly, the writing is terribly done with poorly reasoned arguments and a lot of just plain wrong information. It is yet another example of someone that tried switching to Linux once, sucked at it, and decided that everyone here in the Linux communities must just be lying about having no issues using linux and they should come here to the Linux communites to tell us to stop and we can’t do what we already do every damn day. Jesus, it seems like half of the posts in any Linux community on Lemmy is people that don’t use Linux telling everyone how bad Linux is and how great windows is… wtf guys.

Looks like a taxidermy duck.

KDE Plasma is the best desktop (or you can choose to be wrong)

and then…

if someone is STRONGLY pushing a specific distro/package manager/whatever? Ignore them.

lol. I love it. :P

To OP though, if you really don’t want to “distro-hop”, you definitely should test drive several. Look into Ventoy, it basically makes a bootable flash drive that has a separate folder/partition you can just drop bootable .iso files into, and then on boot Ventoy shows you basically a boot menu that lets you pick any one of the images to boot. If you get a nice and big usb flash drive, you can get basically ALL of the distros you want to try on one bootable usb stick so test driving them requires a lot less time and effort. You won’t get a good idea of performance typically from a live environment, but you get a very good idea for the “look and feel” which will likely help you narrow it down a lot.

This feels out-of-touch itself, like you haven’t actually tried in years. Yes, to rebind your mouse buttons, you will have to install a piece of software, and tell it what you want each button to do… Exactly like you have to do in Windows. I haven’t seen any janky work-arounds needed, and the software is a lot more responsive than I was used to in windows with the official logitech software. You don’t need command line in linux any more often than you need to edit the registry in windows - your typical PC user can get by without it just fine and probably should stay away from it. As for game performance, there will always be variability here, but there is no hard and fast rule like “you will lose 20% performance in linux vs windows”. Some stuff may not get along with proton or linux (big one is some of the “bad actor” anti-cheat stuff, as mentioned elsewhere in this thread that just won’t work at all), but the vast majority is running great under linux - imperceptibly different, if it is even different at all. Finally, there are plenty of distros that will handle all the drivers you need with little to no input from the user. One of the primary selling points of PopOS is fantastic graphics driver support “out of the box”, but they aren’t alone - many make the process invisible or butter smooth.

I always love how many people that don’t use linux to do ‘X’ thing, feel the need to tell people that do use linux every day for ‘X’ how bad linux is at doing ‘X’… People going into windows specific communities and shouting about how bad windows is for ‘X’ or ‘Y’ task would be shunned to oblivion if not outright banned, but they come into the linux communities every day to tell us how bad linux is??

Wild, you are like from the alternate universe where Linux is dominant and nerds play around in windows. Are things better where you are from? :P

Lot of people hating on Garuda here, but I have loved it. Hopefully it goes as smoothly for you as it has for me - it’s been an absolute breath of fresh air. :)

What falls into “unknown”??

My biggest recommendation would be to stay away from Manjaro - they are trying to split the difference between a “long term stable” and a “rolling release” and it just doesn’t seem to work out well long term. Your mileage may vary on that, but I found it to work well and liked it for a few months and then it would just become fubar after an update and I’d end up trying a re-install - rinse and repeat. It steered me away from Linux for a while.

Really, you can be happy on any distribution. Best advice I can give is try several of them. Look into “Ventoy”, which lets you setup a single USB stick (probably want a big one) that you can drag and drop the iso files onto at will and then boot to live environments to try out several different distributions without constantly re-doing the USB stick. Then from there, pick the one you like the look and feel of the most.

I personally have had great luck on Garuda Linux, lots of gaming oriented stuff installed out of the box, and you have access to AUR (which is one of the best parts of Arch based linux), and there are GUI interfaces to manage most of the settings that work well. It has a comfortable level of “hand holding” without trying to restrict you a lot, imo.

I don’t know how common it is anymore, but it definitely was a few years back. You knew a computer was infected with everything when you saw a stupid cartoon dinosaur or something as the mouse cursor as soon as the pc booted to windows… I think it was more about what was bundled in the download from scummy websites doing the damage though, not the actual cursor files. I still cringe though if I see a non-standard cursor in windows, like PTSD-esque flashbacks…

I’d bet it is a typo stating ddr5, not on the CPU model. 8GB sticks of ddr5 are rare enough to find as singles, and 4gb sticks basically don’t exist - makes more sense if it is a DDR3 system. Plus, the GT 730 is basically only barely a graphics card, a lot of them are Fermi based chips (like gt 400 series from 2010)… They are dirt cheap video output for a machine that otherwise wouldn’t have any video out, but they get packaged by less than honest companies/people with other old hardware and marketed as “gaming computers” all the time unfortunately.

Ubuntu is not the limiting factor to this machine gaming, unfortunately. It is going to be choking itself on basically any games from the last 10 years :(

Is it possible to do something like this that can be left on 100% of the time, with some sort of USB pass-through for further connectivity and charging? Or is that too asking too much of the board?

paypal’s business model is basically theft. They regularly “freeze” accounts of people that have money to be taken, refuse to unfreeze them, and then when it eventually turns into a class-action lawsuit they settle for pennies on the dollar (that mostly goes to attorneys anyway). When it happened to me over 10 years ago, I was doing remote tech support and getting paid via paypal. Had a business account that was like 10 years of use. Then one day they froze the account and told me there was “suspicious activity”.

When I appealed and asked what suspicious activity they found, they simply said that there was money in the account and there wasn’t before… Then they asked for, specifically, ebay transaction IDs and UPS or Fedex tracking numbers for the products sold on ebay. I explained to them again that I was not selling on ebay and was doing remote tech support. The person on the other end of the phone just said “ok, well, then your appeal is denied. Your account is staying frozen” and hung up.

I ended up just refunding all the transactions that were recent enough I could (because that was the only thing I could do with the account) and sent those customers a note explaining briefly what happened and that I would rather have done the work for free than have done it so paypal can steal the money…

Eventually got tacked onto a class action and got a low double digit payout almost a decade after losing a few thousand…

That might make sense if they were posting pictures of PS1 era Lara Croft, but they aren’t, they always use the newest examples… They would show a bigger gap in time passed if they used the dragonborn from the initial release of skyrim vs the newest remastered version.

“now now, calm down everyone. Let’s see what the Orphan-Crushing Machine really does before we start getting upset. Just because it is fully capable of (and seems exclusively designed to) crush all orphans doesn’t mean it is actually going to crush ALL the orphans. Probably just a few orphans really.”

There is a reason Microsoft stopped caring a long time ago that it is so easy to install and use Windows without paying for a key. You can STILL use any old windows 7 key you have to active windows 10 and 11. You can use the OS nearly in it’s entirety (as far as home users are concerned) without even doing that. It is because Windows is no longer Microsoft’s biggest product, the user is.

Once got a spec sheet for an appliance made in Europe, but clearly trying to break into the US market so they had gotten rid of all the metric and used inches for cutout dimensions… But they did NOT get the memo about our love of powers of 2 denominators so it was giving everything in fifths and tenths of inches… None of the contractors could figure out how the hell big to make the opening because nobody knew how big 3/5ths or 7/10ths of an inch was…

I had to beg the company rep for the metric measurements, as at least we could get a tape measure with mm markings, but they just wouldn’t do it and sent a corrected spec sheet and the dimensions were now in 32nds and 64ths… At least it was on the right track but I still don’t have a tape measure with that kind of precision… Eventually just had to write our own dimensions that were “close enough”.

(keep in mind, we are talking about a hole in cabinets for refrigerators and dishwashers and stuff… so its like 72 and 37/64 inches tall or some nonsense, so you definitely were not expected to be using a precision measuring tool like calipers for this…)